Belloc’s failure to elaborate a _philosophical_ defence, as well as an historical defence, of the theory of Christendom has left his whole position in jeopardy. Today many highly reputable minds are questioning the validity of the very _idea_ of a Christendom. The attack is psychologically understandable. The older European Order, first wounded by the Reformation, then weakened spiritually by four centuries of rationalism, nationalism, and secular liberalism, now physically and morally ruined by the social conflicts produced by industrial capitalism, has been rubbled possibly beyond repair by two world wars. The Christian community will survive in the new era now being born, it is said, only if she shakes herself free from the husks of a culture that no longer exists. Today the East is throwing off its shackles, and if the Faith is to penetrate into the rising self-consciousness of these peoples, it must come as something native to themselves. To cling to an identification of Catholicism and European Catholicism is not only bad theology, it is bad policy. Catholicism is supra-temporal and can never be associated essentially with any of the passing cultural forms that she blesses. It is, then, impossible to speak of a Christen_dom_ as being some one unique cultural reality, whose soul is the Faith. There is more than a little truth to the above reasoning, and there can be no doubt that Belloc’s dogged passion for complete, final integration and his deep love for the European Order rendered him temperamentally incapable of realizing the _concrete_ possibility of the Faith’s taking root in a non-European form. To separate the Faith from the freedom and the institutions of the West was in his eyes to divorce the mother from its child, and to desecrate that historical unity that centuries had hallowed. If he overstated his case, it can be affirmed nonetheless that he had a case to overstate. The weakness of the anti-Bellocian position lies in its sheer abstractionism. In the abstract there is no question but that the Faith is culturally neutral. But historically it is simply false to say that the Church has always been, and could always be, neutral to any given civilization to which she has come, or will come, preaching salvation. The Church could never have sanctified Carthage with its human sacrifice to Moloch; the Church could never have concreted itself in those border cultures that produced the Mystery Cults and flirted with the pantheisms of the East. Belloc fingered a profound historical truth when he declared that as Revelation incarnates itself the better in a man in proportion to that man’s natural perfection, so too Revelation has always embodied itself in any culture in relation to the degree of corporate perfection achieved by that society.